2014 British Academy Medal • 2014 FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, Financial Times • A New York Times #1 Best Seller • A Sunday Times Best Seller • A Wall Street Journal #1 Best Seller and Favorite Read of 2014 • A Washington Post #1 Best Seller and Top 50 Nonfiction Book of 2014

“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century…will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.”—Paul Krugman, The New York Times

“[Atkinson] does not mind speaking uncomfortable truths. Among them: that the comfort and opportunity provided by wealth matter just as much as the consumption that wealth affords; that holding down a job may not be enough to provide most workers with a standard of living that keeps up with economic growth; and that economic power helps protect itself in subtle and pervasive ways which might well demand an interventionist government response. Sir Anthony’s answer might not be the right one. But if his book reminds the reader how far out of fashion the policies of the post-war decades have fallen, it also conveys how skewed the economy of today might look to an observer from the not so distant past—or, perhaps, from the not so distant future.”—The Economist

“Branko Milanovic has written an outstanding book. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization is informative, wide-ranging, scholarly, imaginative and commendably brief. As you would expect from one of the world’s leading experts on this topic, Milanovic has added significantly to important recent works by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon… Ever-rising inequality looks a highly unlikely combination with any genuine democracy. It is to the credit of Milanovic’s book that it brings out these dangers so clearly, along with the important global successes of the past few decades.”—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

“In this important introduction to the ‘basic income’ initiative—an economic proposal that may radically transform the nature of the modern economy and society—two leading social scientists examine the ethics and economics of the proposed move. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the problems of deprivation and unfreedom that survive even in the richest countries in the world. The remedial reasoning presented by Van Parijs and Vanderborght is powerful as well as highly engaging—a brilliant book.”—Amartya Sen, Harvard University

“Piketty’s work did what decades of rising disparities couldn’t do: it reminded macroeconomists that inequality matters. More starkly, it laid bare just how ill-equipped our existing frameworks are for understanding, predicting, and changing inequality. This extraordinary collection shows that our most nimble social scientists are responding to the challenge, collecting ideas about capital, technology, power, gender, race, and privilege that might help inform a broader understanding.”—Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan

“[An] excellent book… Baldwin’s work seems likely to become a standard, perhaps indispensable, guide to understanding how globalization has got us here and where it is likely to take us next. There can be few more vital subjects today that will benefit from this sort of clear and comprehensive exposition.”—Alan Beattie, Financial Times

“Brooke Harrington’s study of wealth management is one of those rare books where you just have to stand back in awe and wonder at the author’s achievement. In this intensely readable study, she offers a first-ever scholarly insight into a profession that was almost unknown a little over two decades ago… Harrington offers profound insights into the world of the professional people who dedicate their lives to meeting the perceived needs of the world’s ultra-wealthy. And, as she makes clear, the most apparently compelling of those needs is to avoid the rule of law… Don’t doubt the importance of this book’s messages: this is a significant and valuable case study at the current frontier of political economy.”—Richard J. Murphy, Times Higher Education

“[An] ambitious, fast-paced, fact-filled, and accessible book… [Boushey] has a masterful understanding of the nuts and bolts of policy design and has impressively cataloged an array of promising state and local examples. Her policy proposals are not off the beaten path, but her overall argument—simple as it sounds—is a fresh one.”—Janet Gornick, Science

“Boushey offers an ambitious public policy agenda to address the increasingly common situation where both the mother and father work outside the home and thus have less time to care for their families… [A] brilliant book.”—Suzanne Kahn, Dissent

“An important voice… [Baradaran’s] excellent new book, How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation and the Threat to Democracy describes how, for decades, big banks have shed their social contract with the American public and transformed themselves into modern monstrosities which serve corporations and the wealthy and exploit or avoid the less affluent members of our society. Setting the stage with this historical context, Baradaran makes a compelling case for a postal banking system which would greatly benefit millions of struggling ‘unbanked’ Americans.”—Ralph Nader, The Huffington Post

“Frank Pasquale’s notable new book, The Black Box Society, tries to come to grips with the dangers of ‘runaway data’ and ‘black box algorithms’ more comprehensively than any other book to date… It’s an important read for anyone who is interested in the hidden pitfalls of ‘big data’ and who wants to understand just how quantified our lives have become without our knowledge.”—David Auerbach, Slate

“Authoritative… As inequality has drawn increased public debate, most recently thanks to Thomas Piketty’s influential work, the changing conditions of employment have gotten far too little attention. Work remains the prime source of income for most people. The fissuring of work, Weil finds, is one of the main factors in the widening gap between productivity and earnings because it allows corporations to batter down labor costs—people’s paychecks… [The Fissured Workplace] shed[s] important new light on the resurgence of the power of finance and its connection to the debasement of work and income distribution.”—Robert Kuttner, The New York Review of Books

“Capacious and quietly ambitious, offering a dramatic retelling of the intellectual history of the postwar revival of free-market ideas, and it is an excellent example of what can be gained when intellectual history doesn’t focus exclusively on individuals… Burgin’s account of the evolution of the Mont Pelerin Society is a study of the complexity of ideological change, of the ways that ideas conceived in one context can acquire a very different hue over time. It is an immensely rich, careful and thoughtful history that captures the range of opinion within a group of people who are too often seen as having marched in lockstep.”—Kim Phillips-Fein, The Nation

“[Ezrachi and Stucke] make a convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with… Virtual Competition displays a deep understanding of the internet world and is outstandingly researched.”—Burton G. Malkiel, The Wall Street Journal

“Cox creatively transposes the concepts of theology into the language of capitalism and argues that the metaphors of theology, and religion itself, are being co-opted… The Market as God might be an example of what Bonhoeffer meant when he proposed that theologians had to learn to ‘speak of God in a secular fashion and find a nonreligious interpretation of biblical concepts,’ an approach Cox encouraged in 1965. In turn, market boosters are theologizing by casting the Market as a Tillichian ultimate concern and a wiser Cox has returned to interpret the signs of the times. The Market, like all human artifice, is neither natural nor neutral but an object of moral reflection, and in emotive prose Cox offers a moral inquiry into its attributes… Americans are searching for a social vision that serves people against the rule of the Market God, and the impassioned and timely Cox has reminded us of the moral challenges of our economic life.”—Lilian Calles Barger, The New Rambler

Stay Posted

Now Available: The digital Loeb Classical Library (loebclassics.com) extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.

Blog

What we might think of as “Hall’s Dilemma”—the challenge of keeping people from investing meaning into “race” as a category of biological difference, based on superficial differences visible to the eye—is as old as some of the earliest European encounters with “the other” in Africa and the New World in the modern period (beginning five hundred years ago), when differences of culture and phenotype soon fused with economic desire and exploitation to produce “the African” as a new and mostly negative signifier. And for centuries, this toxic compound has played into our very human instinct for defining ourselves through some of our most obvious, often “measurable” diffe…